ALOHA!

What a week this last week has been...I finally did it and graduated, YAY! It was a great night and a real treat to see and hear from President Uchtdorf. Thanks my mom and dad for coming and thanks to mom and dad Merrill for coming as well! After all the graduation fun Dillon and I hurried and finished packing our bags and headed down to Shelley to stay the night. We had to be up and gone bright and early the next morning to head to MAUI!!! That was an adventure. We woke up to no power and had to just throw on some clothes and jump in the car. It took a good 4 1/2 hours to get to SLC because the roads were not very good at all and we were a little afraid we were going to miss our flight. We got there just in time to hear them announce that our flight had been cancelled because our plane couldn't land and had been diverted to Colorado. They were able to get us on a later flight and were talking with the pilot of our connecting flight hoping he would wait for us. We got into Phoneix, ran (litterally) through the airport and hoped onto the waiting plane and 6 hours later we had made it! I can't believe how beautiful it was there in Paradise! It was amazing! Even the sun there is perfect. It was hot the whole time (mid 80's) but it wasn't deathly hot. I got sunburned but it only hurt for about a day and now is nice and tan (too bad it won't last). It only rained on us for a few minutes on Sunday and the rest of the time was sun, sun and more sun. The only bummer of the trip was when all my money was stolen. Yup, that's right...all my cash was stolen right out of our locked rental car. We were parked in a beach parking lot and had walked down to the beach. I figured that my purse was safer in the locked car rather than on the beach. Well, I was wrong. I didn't even notice it was gone until later that night when we went out to eat. It turns out that Dillon's dad's wallet had been in the car too and all his cash was gone as well. All in all we were out at least $350 with over half of that being mine. I was pretty upset that night but soon got over it as I realized that there was nothing at all that we could do about it. Luckily Dillon's wallet hadn't been in the car so we had a little cash to use. It didn't stop us from going to that beach though, it was the best one we found and we spent basically all our time chilling on the beach and boogie boarding. We did find some pretty sweet beaches that were great for snorkling. We did also go on a snorkling tour thing Monday morning. That was pretty cool despite Dillon and his mom being sea sick the whole time. We got to see lots of cool lookin fish and even swim with sea turtles. One of the days that we went on our own we even swam with a shark. It was just a wee bit scary! lol. Me and Dillon were swimming around and he asked me if I had seen it, I hadn't and he wanted a picture (we had an underwater camera) so we hung around waiting for it to come back out of it's little cave. Sure enough it did. It came out and up towards us a little bit then went back down in. About that time Dillon's mom and little bro came over by us and stayed long enough for them to see it then it was to shore for us women! :) We guessed it to be able 6 ft long, not huge but big enough to make me pee my pants. But it was cool. Other than the beaches we found a little rain forest to walk through (that was AMAZING) and did some shopping in the evenings. On our last night in Hawaii we got to go to a Luau. Those dancers are insane, I can't even imagine being able to move my hips like that! lol. I didn't get many pictures of that night but I will have some as soon as I get them from my mom-in-law. The sunsets in Hawaii are the best I have ever seen! We made sure to stay on the beaches long enough to see the sunset before we went home. On Thursday night all of us girls thought it would be fun to dress up in our Hawaiian get up, find some flowers for our hair and go watch the sunset...so we did. I know we look so hot but we had just gotten back from swimming all day and didn't really have time to primp, the sun wasn't waiting for us! :) Well...now we're home, in all the snow. I miss the Maui sun but am glad to be home for a white Christmas.

Mele Kalikimaka everyone!